The Washington Center

Assessing Learning in Learning Communities

It is critical to define and distinguish integration and interdisciplinary in order to achieve clarity and substance for a learning community program.

– from the University of Kansas team's final report

A great strength of learning communities is their potential to foster integrative and interdisciplinary learning, an essential skill in education and the workplace. The American Association of Colleges & Universities (AACU) names “integrative and applied learning” as one of four essential learning outcomes.

Early conversations about LCs focused at a macro-level on what courses could be combined. A slight shift in focus, to the actual substance of what students are learning in LCs, led to the development of this heuristic for designing integrated learning. Widespread use of the heuristic, and multiple variations of it, began to highlight the importance of good assignment design.